Let's have some fun : How many (meaningful) coding experience do you have ? - page 2
You are missing trading opportunities:
- Free trading apps
- Over 8,000 signals for copying
- Economic news for exploring financial markets
Registration
Log in
You agree to website policy and terms of use
If you do not have an account, please register
I am a web developer, I am specialized in PHP, Slowly after getting bored from my work, I moved towards intraday full margin trading and my friend introduced me to mt5, which I found good terminal as i was doing research and development. I did not have knowledge about C, C++ and at start but slowly after watching code examples on codebase, I learnt in in 1 year and was able to code trading systems, indicators and utility after learning basics.
MQL is best system which helped me find me my trading method.
You forgot to include the range 40-50 years.
Officially started in the army, almost 30 yrs ago. Before also in high school.
Mql since 2011 or so.
Incoming wall of text feel free to ignore :D
I chose less than 1 year, but maybe, just maybe, it aggregates to a little over a year. My story is one of a nerd that never really made it all the way to programming until later in life.
I'd say I never really truly began working with coding in a serious way until a few months ago with MQL5, but I've many times come a stone's throw away from it. I think anyone used to dealing with command lines or heavily tweaking software/config files etc. has their brain primed for it.
As a child in the late 80's and early 90's I was typing on MS-DOS to play with computers before I even knew how to read and at times indulged in creating batch files that acted as menu systems which would run at startup (that was after I learned to read, of course).
At the age of 12, around '96 so I got on AOL and the world wide web for the first time. I somehow found myself becoming involved in pirating software chatrooms and "proggies" which were AOL programs used to do nefarious activities, like boot people offline, bust into full chatrooms, attempt to brute force accounts with repeated dial-up login attempts, serve pirated software in chatrooms automatically, or just all sorts of misc. fun stuff that could be done in AOL. At one point I wanted to make my own proggie and found the easiest way to do so was with Visual Basic. I never went too far, just used premade modules that made it easy to manipulate the Windows GUI and the GUI of software running, i.e. AOL. However, I am proud to say that of all the proggies I used,my chat send was by far the most reliable way to spam chat as fast as possible without getting booted offline. It was probably 2 pages of code, but it self-modulated in case of lag, which was a very major issue on dialup. I also made a chatroom buster which worked just fine, no better/worse than any proper chatroom buster.
Around the same time I met a guy at school who was an absolute genius, and he was into using POV-RAY to make 3D scenes and even videos. The thing about POV-RAY is that to make your graphical creations is entirely a coding process, not drawing on a GUI. Once again, I only dabbled, occasionally going on huge stretches of endless hours, but never really going the distance. I was able to make some pretty 3D scenes, but very primitive, and non-animated, but my friend was the real master. Maybe not coding per se, but not too far off from it either.
At the same time I also became interested in making web sites. I only used HTML and ended up making some fancy looking web site which was totally within the style of the time, back when web sites actually had individual character and design, however cheesy, not like now where everything has been corporatized into homogeneity.
Despite the fact that I never became a master at any of these things, my dabblings often had me working for 10-20 hours at a stretch and what little results I got were very satisfying.
My next memory of some kind of coding came perhaps 7-8 years later around 19-20 years of age, perhaps close to the end of the golden era of the internet around 2004 or so. Once again I decided to make a website and host it on my cable connection from a spare junk PC. This time I had the advantage of being able to shove 3 video cards in my system and have 3 CRT monitors side by side, 1 or 2 of which came from dumpsters. This made the process of doing graphical design, HTML, and a tiny bit of PHP, and monitoring my results by refreshing a web page on a side monitor much more efficient.I used a bit of PHP because I needed some way to take the standard layout elements of the website and just include them on each separate web page quickly instead of having to copy/paste everything and then hunt for the small gap in the code where I would put the actual page content. With PHP I could simply invoke the layout pieces in a few lines and focus on the content without being distracted by huge amounts of layout code, which was quite voluminous because I made a big effort to make a very graphically fancy/precise layout. I was very happy with how the site turned out visually, but like usual I had no stamina for maintaining interest, and it was yet another dabble.which was quite voluminous because I made a big effort to make a very graphically fancy/precise layout. I was very happy with how the site turned out visually, but like usual I had no stamina for maintaining interest, and it was yet another dabble.
After this around 23-24 came the darkest period of my life. After I got fired from my janitor job of almost 4 years for sleeping in an office (I have non-24 hour disorder, didn't realize it then) in which I spent 10 years not even being able to buy a job, but there was a bright spot. I ended up getting into World of Warcraft (WoW), even though I vowed not to, and slowly over the years became an expert not only at high skill gameplay, but also profiteering on the auction house. The interesting thing about the game WoW is that it has its own interface language that lets you code addons for the game which can enhance the user interface and also give additional functionality, to the extent the game allows. Full automation is not allowed, but some degree is, as long as it isn't automating actual gameplay actions of character control.More-so than anyone I ever knew, I used huge amounts of addons, which I tweaked endlessly, both for auction house profiteering and for gameplay. Eventually I spent nearly 3 months designing my own custom WoW user interface from the ground up, creating a standard configuration template using a huge suite of addons, many of which were so heavily configured they didn't even resemble other peoples' use of those addons, and to fully tweak them sometimes even required going into the code itself and possibly modifying something, but I never really learned it to the point I could do my own addon programming.
It should also be noted that in WoW, players can set up macros and extensive hotkey maps for gameplay. These macros allow you to program in gameplay/interface actions which can then be invoked via clicks or keybinds. I ended up going overboard and using an addon that expanded the number of macros to practically unlimited, and allowed the macros to be about 20 times longer in max length than usual. Every character class/spec I ever played, I ended up creating a huge suite of keybound and non-keybound macros, some of which had pages of code. This allowed me to setup dozens of keybinds per character and play with extreme levels of control/precision/efficiency.
In order to secure my addon configurations I had to come up with backup protocols to ensure I did not lose these configs I spent years perfecting, not only for a general UI, but for character/spec specific UI's. In addition, to implement these templates into new characters, new servers, etc, required having to do very precise/careful hack jobs of config files to copy/paste certain things, and sometimes manually type out/change certain things, otherwise the settings won't take properly. Many addons had their own weird ways of storing data which differed from each other, so I had to learn how each one knew what config info to use. This was a clumsy process involving pouring over configuration files and sometimes even inspecting the code itself. It involved lots of logins/relogs, UI refreshes, etc.I set up an extensive batch file to automate backups to multiple drives, dropbox, etc.
Finally, around 2017 I was employed again at a factory. After the initial joy of having money and being able to buy a new computer wore off I realized I can't handle employment because my body needs to maintain a sleep schedule that shifts later every day. Having to be places at certain times destroys me. So I shifted to part time and looked for an alternative. A guy at work told me day trading penny stocks was easy, so I began learning about stocks and day trading. For the next several years I learned about trading. I started off with support/resistance + low floater stock trading. Then I decided I preferred the highly liquid most heavily traded stocks and index ETFs, still focusing on price levels but also integrating some indicators that I found interesting.3-4 years ago I discovered Steven Kalayjian and his insane 40+ monitor trading room setup. I was becoming heavily jaded with my development of my chosen day trading style because updating/maintaining price level and trend line drawings on a bunch of symbols was so much work. Eventually I digged into Steve's videos and ended up copying his entire indicator setup except for 1. It was amazing on multiple timeframes for the stock market. No more levels, no more trendlines, no more drawings. The indicators operated automatically and it was very easy to make trade decisions with them, although I could combine them with levels for even more potential precision, but it wasn't necessary. I branched off from his style and made it my own instead.
Eventually the problems of trading stocks as a poor person in the US became too much for me and I looked into forex. The new MTF indicator style of trading I was doing was good for all instruments: stocks, futures, crypto, forex, bonds, etc. I realized forex was the most accessible market in the world for a poor person, although the spreads were horrible. For the next couple years I developed my own forex specific version of multi-timeframe indicator based trading, specifically around the stochastics. At a certain point I realized that what I was developing was so mechanical that I felt like a chump trying to do it manually. I even developed a spreadsheet where I look over 28 currency pair stochastics on multiple timeframes, rate their conditions with numbers, punch them into the sheet,and it spits out currency power scores for the currencies and currency pairs, to look for the greatest disparities in power to trade. Developing this spreadsheet required using some VB in excel, but not much. Still, it took months of work for me to do, and although the sheet was very powerful, in the end, I realized that manually rating/updating the stochastics every day was too much work, and the process of day trading was just too difficult.
I had already learned that price patterns go where they go. They are not loyal to one instrument. They appear/disappear anywhere and everywhere, thus the most efficient way to harvest the best setups is to watch as many liquid instruments as possible, preferably ones that have correlation relationships, or inverse relationships, which in currencies is fantastic, purely on a technical level. I was already watching traders who I learned from and used similar methods to myself, beginning to switch to automation by building EA's for MT4. The more time went on, the more painful it became to try to manually monitor the market or trade, because every single thing I did was purely mechanical and could be programmed. But the problem is, the idea of programming just seemed too hard/intimidating to be worth it. However, eventually it became so painful to force myself to manually trade, that I ended up being forced to learn MQL5.
I only started learning MQL5 a few months ago, and already I have indicator projects and an EA that is currently auto-trading 28 pairs with bastardized logic (it will take months to program all my system stuff into it) but bug free. It's not profitable because it's using a highly over-simplified rule set, but the purpose was to just create something that actually works programmatically. Also, its lack of profitability backtests/forward tests consistently the same, exactly as expected based on my understanding of the technicals. Many times I've seen it jump into trades on multiple pairs at once, automatically bruting past requotes, and I've seen it hit initial scalp targets, piece out, breakeven on 5 symbols in the span of just 1-2 seconds. I added StarCraft sound effects to everything so I know when things happen :D
Several thousand lines of code in, the EA is quite simple and many modules will need to be built to be more robust, as they're currently relatively non-dynamic and won't account for many things that will need to be accounted for later. But that doesn't matter. As I more fully modularize, I can build these things up over time. My next task is to continue building up my special stochastics indicator which feeds the EA data/signals.
In the span of a single day the EA makes dozens, hundreds of trading decisions. As I program it further to actually resemble the trading system I spent years developing, I no longer have to expend my decision making on individual trades. Instead, I can simply review what the EA does and spend my mental power on making sure the EA has the correct instructions to conform to my will and behave as I would behave, to be aware of the data I would be aware of.
I've already modified some indicators made by other people, and also learned how certain ones work, all because of MQL5. I even do that with MQL4 indicators and even copied an MQL4 indicator into MQL5 and then changed it to work with MT5 and be part of my own projects.
I love no longer being at the mercy of the MQL5 marketplace or programmers. It's amazing how easy it is to do things I've always wanted to do with indicators but didn't know how. Now my only problem is there are only 24 hours in a day, and my to-do list of indicator/EA projects is so big I'm booked for the next 2-3 years easy. I'm hoping that in 6-12 months my EA will be capable of generating automatic F-you money. But if it takes longer, it will still be worth it. Manual trading is for chumps. Mechanical technical systems should be automated. If they can't be automated, they are too discretionary. Discretionary traders get ulcers and heart attacks. Even a billion dollars is not worth that.
At the moment I'm still horrible at programming/MQL5. When I see people talking here I feel like a retard surrounded by geniuses. But, once I got over the first phase of learning, it feels great to be able to at least make things that work, and generally feel like anything I want to make I can, although it might take wayyyy too long.
Also, I truly cannot understand how anyone could enjoy professional programming. I can't imagine having to put all this creative work into something that isn't even my own project. I guess for me the payoff is in the programs themselves, not so much the process of coding. Sometimes when I run into problems and spend hours grappling with them, my body becomes stiff and riddled with pain, and the programming is horrible. But other times, I'm in the zone and flow state, and programming is the most relaxing and enjoyable/stimulating way to spend my time. But where I get the most joy is actually seeing my programs running and doing what I want at the speed of electrons.